Josh and Tran Wills love their art collection. And the accumulation of works, picked up over the past ten years, is worth far more to the local fashion-forward couple than its collective monetary value. “They are almost like tattoos for us,” notes Tran, each piece with its own unique story…
Create Denver Week will end on a girly note today with Your Sunday Best, a meeting of Fashion Denver’s local stylistas and the Denver Handmade Alliance’s crafty crews under the elegant roof of the Grant-Humphreys Mansion. This marks the first time a Fashion Denver quarterly market and the DHA’s trademark…
No local festival directly showcases the creative community more perfectly than Create Denver Week, an annual city-sponsored May series of cultural events that includes the flagship Create Denver Expo, a purposeful gathering of minds all marching to different drummers. The rest of it operates like a huge invitation to Denverites…
The newly renamed Aurora Arts District has had a tough time of it. Formerly the East End Arts District, the downtown Aurora area that roughly extends a block either way from Colfax between Clinton and Geneva streets, has been faithfully hosting Second Friday art walks without getting much of a…
The Chamber Music Series hosted by the Denver School of the Arts Orchestra might just be the local classical music world’s best-kept secret, but not for any particularly good reason. Programmed by and featuring DSA visiting artist Erik Peterson, a Colorado Symphony violinist, and friends, the series is anything but…
There’s nothing new about a two-person exhibit; galleries host them all the time. But Bleached, a joint show at CORE New Art Space featuring Cal Duran and Claudia Roulier, offers a refreshing variation on the concept. For this “solo two-man show,” as Roulier calls it, the duo became a kind…
I’ve been at Dana Cain’s Colorado Chocolate Festival every year for the last few, both as a contest judge and as an appreciative chocoholic fool. There, I’ve tasted everything from chocolate sauces to artisan truffles, but none of it prepared me for this year’s challenge: judging chocolate cakes, along with…
Blue skies reigned at Saturday’s Horseshoe Craft and Flea Market in Berkeley Park, where more than 100 craft and flea market vendors set up their tents in a parking lot at 46th Avenue and Tennyson Street. That noted, it couldn’t have been a more beautiful day for mother-daughter bonding, people…
With blue skies predicted for the next few days, there ain’t no way First Friday won’t be sprouting artwalkers like dandelions. Spring is here, the art is good and the art districts are alive with the breath of things to come. Here are a few of our First Friday picks…
There’s something unendingly compelling about New York City’s downtown No Wave scene, which was peopled by Lydia Lunch and James Chance and bands like the Contortions, DNA and the Bush Tetras: In terms of coolness, today’s hipsters can’t even reach the shoe-laces of that underground set and its smoldering intellectual…
If you ask Naropa-schooled Austin performance artist Teresa Harrison, she’ll say that Allen Ginsberg’s groundbreaking mid-century epic poem Howl — recently in the public eye as the inspiration for last year’s film docudrama of the same name with James Franco as Ginsberg — fits modern times as handily as it…
What’s the deal with hard-edge painting, anyway? As Plus Gallery’s Ivar Zeile notes, “Some people take it for granted. They look at it and say, ‘How hard can that be? Where is the relationship to life and philosophy?’” Maybe so. But if you take one good, hard-edged look at the…
These days, Judy Anderson is best known for her good work as director of PlatteForum, the nonprofit in the Central Platte Valley that pairs resident artist-mentors with at-risk kids for a start-to-finish exhibition experience. A talented artist in her own right, with a strong background in education and design, Anderson…
Over the weekend, I visited the first Indie Wearable Craft urban market, a three-day pop-up bazaar hosted by a select group of local designers, including Jil Cappuccio, Kirsten Coplans of Pearl Clothing and Christina Patzman of Darling Ruth, among others. Their collective bag is cross-merchandising, and they’ve made an art…
Inherit the Wind, the fictionalized account of the Scopes Monkey Trial by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, might just be the greatest courtroom drama ever written, and its main theme — whether or not Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution should be taught in a public school — is as…
When Frank Warren famously handed out hundreds of postcards in 2004 to strangers on the street, asking them to write down a secret and send the cards back anonymously, the big surprise is that they really did it. It was such a popular project, in fact, that Warren turned it…
When the curtain goes up tonight on Patrick Mueller and Control Group Productions, a dance company in flux, at BINDERY | space, it will be a poignant moment for a number of reasons: because Control Group, still in the search-and-negotiate stage of finding a new home and performance space, found…
This isn’t the first time Jimmy Sellars of Sellars Project Space has tried private artist studio tours as a gallerist. And although it died away the first time around, he thinks the time is ripe, with spring in the air, longer days and a renewed interest in art collecting, to…
It takes a good round of networking to connect like-minded groups and form a community, and that’s the thinking behind Red Drinks Denver, a new fashion-world take on the Green Drinks model, which was devised to unite people working in the environmental arena. A democratic event dreamed up jointly by…
Any American art venue director lucky enough to nab Nick Bantock’s first retrospective and first show of any kind in the United States would be ecstatic, but for Cynthia Madden Leitner of the Museum of Outdoor Arts in CityCenter Englewood, it’s also personal, almost to the point of embarrassment. She…
In Japanese, “sawagi” is so defined: Uproar, commotion, revel, excitement, hubbub, ado, merrymaking. In plain English, it’s a hell-raisin’ party, though tomorrow night’s SAWAGI! Raising a Ruckus for Japan, a joint effort of Naropa University and Kansuke Productions to raise funds to send bottled water to the quake-shattered Tohoku region…
I often look through old albums of my grandfather’s family photos from the 1920s, marveling at how he must have labored to produce them in his hobbyist’s darkroom, even creating clever photocollages for my mother’s birthday invitations. In the present, everyone’s a photographer, and our cameras have become a ubiquitous…
